Simple Grooveshark play / previous / next media keys hook

A few days ago, a good friend of mine told me he’d like to be able to play/go back/skip the songs on Grooveshark, and asked whether I could write a small application to implement the functionality he needed.

I thought this to be a great occasion to stick my nose in C# and see what’s what. A few hours later I had a simple application that does just what was required. There’s nothing fancy about it, and I don’t plan on adding any new features, but feel free to grab the source code and modify it after your own heart’s desire.

How to use:

Open the Skipper app

Open Grooveshark in your browser – I hope you’re using Firefox or Chrome! If you’re using Internet Explorer, help make the world a better place and download one of the browsers mentioned above!

Drag the Window Finder tool on top of the Grooveshark window

Add the X,Y coordinates for the play / previous / next buttons in the app (you can find these by taking a capture of your screen and using any image editing software to find the coordinates). Please note that the coordinates have to be in Window space, meaning that you should compute X and Y starting with from the top-left corner of your window, not from the top-left of your screen)

Make sure you don’t change the tab in the browser. The Grooveshark tab must ALWAYS be active. If you need multiple tabs, I suggest you open Grooveshark in a separate browser.

Use the media keys (play / previous / next) on your keyboard to navigate through the songs.

NOTE: the browser window does not have to be active, it can be hidden by other windows and this will still work

I’ve only tested this on Windows 7 but it should work in Vista / XP as well.

If you need additional functionality, feel free to modify the source code, I will not have time to upgrade it.

Edit: A big thank you to Ruurd Moelker for taking the time to improve the application by adding the following:

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 7th, 2010 at 9:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
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